This expanded and revised edition explores and updates the cultural politics of the Walt Disney Company and how its ever-expanding list of products, services, and media function as teaching machines that shape children's culture into a largely commercial endeavor. The Disney conglomerate remains an important case study for understanding both the widening influence of free-market fundamentalism in the new millennium and the ways in which messages of powerful corporations have been appropriated and increasingly resisted in global contexts. New in this edition is a discussion of Disney's shift in its marketing strategies towards targeting tweens and teens, as Disney promises to provide (via participation in consumer culture) the tools through which young people construct and support their identities, values, and knowledge of the world. The updated chapters from the highly acclaimed first edition are complimented with two new chapters, "Globalizing the Disney Empire" and "Disney, Militarization, and the National Security State After 9/11," which extend the analysis of Disney's effects on young people to a consideration of the political and economic dimensions of Disney as a U.S.-based megacorporation, linking the importance of critical reception on an individual scale to a broader conception of democratic global community.

"This book has expanded since 1999 (CH, Feb'00, 37-3408), just as the Walt Disney Corporation has. And, caveat emptor, mirroring the Disney empire's covert maneuvers to turn children into consumers, so, ironically, the publisher and the authors (both McMaster Univ.) would have libraries and scholars acquire this edition, which the publisher announces as 'thoroughly revised and updated throughout.' Alternating in tone between popular and pedantic, the book retains its provocative and compelling original stance: Disney wrote on children's tabulae rasae and shaped the cultural imaginations of several generations of American youth. But the authors include two new chapters, one on militarization and one on Disney's current global influence, which extends even to Shanghai. Giroux and Pollock's argument that Disney edits public memory, channels children toward desiring consumption, reconstructs historical narratives (even turning America into a theme park), and controls pedagogy continues to be worthy of debate, and the authors supply fresh and cogent illustrations (e.g., the Jonas Brothers, Pixar, post-9/11 culture) to bolster their claims. This screed against the monopolistic idolatry of Disney still commands attention. Recommended." - CHOICE